My Climate Change News

Future oil and gas drilling will be limited across more than 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, the nation’s largest expanse of public land, under a sweeping Biden administration plan aimed at protecting sensitive ecosystems and wildlife.

The Interior Department’s final rule represents one of President Biden’s most significant steps to curb fossil fuel development on federal lands. It could help the president’s reelection campaign court young voters, a key Democratic constituency, after many youth climate activists criticized the administration’s approval of a massive drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope last year.

In a separate move, Interior announced Friday that it will block a controversial road crucial to operating a planned copper and zinc mine in northern Alaska, saying it would threaten Indigenous communities and fragment wildlife habitat. Together, the two decisions are aimed at safeguarding some of Alaska’s last wild places ...

The administration has blocked a proposed industrial road needed to mine copper in the middle of the state, and has banned oil drilling on 13 million acres in the North Slope.

The Biden administration expanded federal protections across millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness on Friday, blocking oil, gas and mining operations in some of the most unspoiled land in the country.

The Interior Department said it would deny a permit for an industrial road that the state of Alaska had wanted to build through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in order to reach a large copper deposit with an estimated value of $7.5 billion. It also announced it would ban drilling in more than half of the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an ecologically sensitive expanse north of the Arctic Circle.

Together, the two moves amount to one of biggest efforts in history to shield Alaskan land from drilling and mining. They are expected to face challenges ...

The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket - chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.

With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.

The historic heat wave that besieged Mali and other parts of West Africa this month - which scientists say would have been “virtually impossible” in a world without human-caused climate change - is just the ...

Note: this blog post has been put together over the course of the week I followed the happenings at the conference virtually. Should recordings of the Great Debates and possibly Union Symposia mentioned below, be released sometime after the conference ends, I'll include links to the ones I participated in.

This year's General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) started on Monday April 15 both on premise in Vienna and online as a fully hybrid conference. This year, I decided to join virtually for the whole week, picking and chosing sessions I was interested in. At the time of publication this blog post was still an evolving compilation - a kind of personal diary - of the happenings from my perspective.

As this post will get fairly large, you can jump to the different days, via these links (bolded days have been added already):

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday

The already published prolog blog post contains general ...

What is the mass of a neutrino at rest? This is one of the big unanswered questions in physics. Neutrinos play a central role in nature. A team led by Klaus Blaum, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, has now made an important contribution in "weighing" neutrinos as part of the international ECHo collaboration. Their findings are published in Nature Physics.

Using a Penning trap, it has measured the change in mass of a holmium-163 isotope with extreme precision when its nucleus captures an electron and turns into dysprosium-163. From this, it was able to determine the Q value 50 times more accurately than before. Using a more precise Q-value, possible systematic errors in the determination of the neutrino mass can be revealed.

In the 1930s, it turned out that neither the energy nor the momentum balance is correct in the radioactive beta decay of an atomic nucleus. This led to the postulate of "ghost particles" that "secretly" ...

The reality of climate change came home for Dr. Samantha Ahdoot one summer day in 2011 when her son was 9 years old.

She and her family were living in Charlottesville, where Ahdoot is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. There was a heat wave. Morning temperatures hovered in the high 80s, and her son had to walk up a steep hill to get to his day camp.

About an hour after he left for camp, she received a call from a nearby emergency room. Her son had collapsed from the heat and needed IV fluids to recover.

“It was after that event that I realized that I had to do something,” she said. “That, as a pediatrician and a mother, this was something that I had to learn about and get involved in.”

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Dr. Ahdoot made good on that vow. She is the lead author ...

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Analysis of mooring observations and hydrographic data suggest the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation deep water limb in the North Atlantic has weakened. Two decades of continual observations provide a greater understanding of the Earth's climate regulating system.

A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience led by scientists at University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, found that human-induced environmental changes around Antarctica are contributing to sea level rise in the North Atlantic.

"Although these regions are tens of thousands of miles away from each other and abyssal areas are a few miles below the ocean surface, our results reinforce the notion that even the most remote areas of the world's oceans are not untouched by human activity," said the study's lead author Tiago Biló, an ...

The West African nations of Mali and Burkina Faso experienced an exceptional heat wave from April 1 until April 5, with soaring temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) triggering many deaths.

Observations and climate models used by researchers at the WWA showed that "heat waves with the magnitude observed in March and April 2024 in the region would have been impossible to occur without the global warming of 1.2C to date", which scientists attribute to human-induced climate change.

While periods of high temperatures are common in the Sahel at this time of year, the report said that the April heat wave would have been 1.4C cooler "if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels".

It added that the five days of extreme heat was a once-in-a-200-year event, but that "these trends will continue with future warming".

The length and severity of the extreme heat led to an increase in the number of deaths and hospitalizations in ...

Land subsidence is overlooked as a hazard in cities, according to scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Virginia Tech. Writing in the journal Science, Prof Robert Nicholls of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at UEA and Prof Manoochehr Shirzaei of Virginia Tech and United Nations University for Water, Environment and Health, Ontario, highlight the importance of a new research paper analyzing satellite data that accurately and consistently maps land movement across China.

While they say in their comment article that consistently measuring subsidence is a great achievement, they argue it is only the start of finding solutions. Predicting future subsidence requires models that consider all drivers, including human activities and climate change, and how they might change with time.

Nationally, roughly 270 million urban residents are estimated to be affected, with nearly 70 million experiencing rapid subsidence of 10mm a year or more. ...

I am a zoologist who has studied bats for many years. Recently, while doing some reading about South Africa's fossils, I started wondering about bat fossils. Given the continent's incredible bat biodiversity, I was sure the country's fossil record would be teeming with bat bones.

I was wrong. While there appear to be many bat fossils from the Pleistocene epoch (about 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago) onwards, South Africa's database of bat fossils from before the Pleistocene is surprisingly sparse when compared to Europe and the United States. Investigating even further, I discovered the same results for the rest of the continent.

Why does Africa, today so rich with bat biodiversity, offer so few clues about these creatures' ancient pasts? In a recent article for the South African Journal of Science, I offered some educated speculation about the continent's sparse bat fossil record. It seems bat fossils are rare in Africa mainly because bats lived in places where ...

Senior Couple Walking in London by Themeisle used under CC ZERO 1.0

When climate disasters like wildfires, flooding, heat waves, or polar vortexes grip communities, they hold a sharper threat for older adults, whose numbers in the US and Canada are growing. And even beyond these more headline-grabbing events are the everyday activities that may prove more challenging for older adults to perform independently in a warmer world. In Cascadia, that might look like being able to afford air conditioning to keep cool as the summers get hotter. Or so one can close the windows against wildfire smoke to keep indoor air safer for breathing, especially for those with respiratory ailments.

Housing expert and community resilience advocate Danielle Arigoni argues in her new book that adapting our communities to better serve the needs of older adults - generally defined as those 65 and older - in fact makes our communities safer, more livable, and more climate-resilient for ...

Dr. Manoela Machado, a postdoctoral researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and also at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and the lead author of the study, said, "Emergency fire bans are not a standalone solution for the fire crises; they can be effective when strategically implemented and rigorously enforced during critical periods to prevent ignitions, but to solve the crises, we need measures that address the motivations behind different types of fires and, most crucially, focus on stopping deforestation."

The Amazon plays an essential role in regulating global climate patterns, supporting biodiversity, and sustaining local and Indigenous communities. The persistent inability to effectively manage these fires not only jeopardizes the ecological integrity of the Amazon but also intensifies global climate change and negatively impacts human health and well-being.

Dr. Erika Berenguer, a co-author of the study, said, "When ...

Now, marine scientists have shown for the first time that juvenile great white sharks select warm and shallow waters to aggregate within one kilometer from the shore. These results, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, are important for conservation of great white sharks—especially as ocean temperatures increase due to climate change—and for protecting the public from negative shark encounters.

Baby great white sharks ("pups") don't receive any maternal care after birth. In the studied population off Padaro Beach near Santa Barbara in central California, pups and juveniles gather in "nurseries," unaccompanied by adults.

"This is one of the largest and most detailed studies of its kind. Because around Padaro Beach, large numbers of juveniles share near-shore habitats, we could learn how environmental conditions influence their movements," said senior author Dr. Christopher Lowe, a professor at California State University.

"You rarely see great ...

The measure elevates conservation in a number of ways, including by creating new leases for the restoration of degraded areas.

The Biden administration on Thursday announced a new federal rule for the nation’s sprawling public lands that puts conservation on par with activities like grazing, energy development and mining.

The new rule relates to areas overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, some 245 million acres that make up a tenth of the country’s land, mainly in the West. It elevates conservation in a number of ways, including by creating two new kinds of leases for the restoration of degraded lands and for offsetting environmental damage.

These lands have long been managed for “multiple uses,” including cattle ranching, drilling and recreation. But some of those activities, combined with new pressures from wildfires and drought, both fueled by climate change, have taken a toll.

“As stewards of America’s public lands, the Interior Department ...

Over the next 25 years, as the world shifts away from fossil fuels, the oil and gas wells that have sustained the fossil fuel age will have to be plugged.

No big deal, you might think, drilling those wells was the hard part. Plugging them should be no problem. But think again.

The Norwegian Continental Shelf, as an example, is punctured by more than 2,000 wells. Harald Linga, center director for SWIPA, a Center for Research Based Innovation based at SINTEF, Scandinavia's largest independent research institute, estimates that plugging them using today's technology will cost upwards of NOK 800 billion - that's USD 73 billion.

And while oil companies are responsible for plugging the wells, Norwegian taxpayers will have to shoulder 78% of these costs.

And that's just Norway. The total number of oil wells across the globe could number in the millions, all of which at some time will have to be plugged.

Today's technology involves using a cement plug ...

Development and groundwater pumping are causing land subsidence and heightening the risks of sea level rise.

As China’s cities grow, they are also sinking.

An estimated 16 percent of the country’s major cities are losing more than 10 millimeters of elevation per year and nearly half are losing more than 3 millimeters per year, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

These amounts may seem small, but they accumulate quickly. In 100 years, a quarter of China’s urban coastal land could sit below sea level because of a combination of subsidence and sea level rise, according to the study.

“It’s a national problem,” said Robert Nicholls, a climate scientist and civil engineer at the University of East Anglia who reviewed the paper. Dr. Nicholls added that, to his knowledge, this study is the first to measure subsidence across many urban areas at once using state-of-the-art radar data from satellites.

Subsidence in these cities is ...

Rooftop solar adoption is critical for residential decarbonization and hinges on its value to households. Climate change will probably affect the value of rooftop solar through impacts on rooftop solar generation and cooling demand, but no studies have quantified this effect. In this study, we quantified household-level effects of climate change on rooftop solar value and techno-economically optimal capacity by integrating empirical demand data for over 2,000 US households across 17 cities, household-level simulation and optimization models, and downscaled weather data for historic and future climates. We found that climate change will increase the value of rooftop solar to households by up to 19% and increase techno-economically optimal household capacity by up to 25% by the end of the century under a Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 scenario. This increased value is robust across cities, households, future warming scenarios and retail tariff structures. Researchers, ...

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research, focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area and is the first health impact assessment of coal train pollution in the world.

It found that coal train pollution has significant health effects that disproportionately impact communities of color and people who are young, old, or have low incomes.

While centered on East Bay neighborhoods, the study carries implications for communities worldwide living alongside passing coal trains. At least 80 countries use coal power, which generates about 40% of the world's electricity.

"These trains run all over the world, exposing the poorest populations who often live close to the train tracks," said lead author Bart Ostro, a scientist with the UC Davis Air Quality Research Center. "As a result, these impacts have local and global implications."

Coal, and more coal

The study includes parts of Oakland, Berkeley, Martinez and Richmond, where coal is already being ...

A geo-environmental scientist from Japan has composed a string quartet using sonified climate data. The 6-minute-long composition - titled "String Quartet No. 1 "Polar Energy Budget" - is based on over 30 years of satellite-collected climate data from the Arctic and Antarctic and aims to garner attention on how climate is driven by the input and output of energy at the poles.

The backstory about how the composition was put together is published April 18 in the journal iScience as part of a collection "Exploring the Art-Science Connection."

"I strongly hope that this manuscript marks a significant turning point, transitioning from an era where only scientists handle data to one where artists can freely leverage data to craft their works," writes author and composer Hiroto Nagai, a geo-environmental scientist at Rissho University.

Scientist-composer Hiroto Nagai asserts that music, as opposed to sound, evokes an emotional response and posits that "musification" ...